PhysX ?

[Vogon]

I understood this was hardware accelerated tool to allow the GPU to offload work from the CPU.
I noticed when running the Arkham City in game bench, that extra graphics are visible (namely glass fragments flying about on one scene).
Would this mean an AMD card wouldn't show these effects, or is there something fishy going on ?

 

[kaku]

They don't appear if you have an AMD card.

Some games allow you to enable them anyway, but the performance hit is huge.
I really noticed it moving from an AMD card to nVidia in Borderlands 2 and Alice Madness Returns.

 

[Vogon]

Freaky ! seems odd there are extra graphics ... must skew any comparison benchies on games with it then.

 

[no_1_dave]

It's not just extra graphics.
Each particle with physx is supposed to be affected by mavity, wind, the explosion etc instead of just being a pre computed animation.

At least, that's what Nvidia would have you believe.
I am sceptical myself, however the cloth effects in some games are clearly better than without using physx & realistic cloth affects are known to be very demanding for CPUs...

 

[IceWind]

tessaltion sort of makes physx a redundant tech. You play a game that has tesslation done correctly it looks a lot better than physx

 

[SkeeterUK]

Tessellation is not the same thing as physx. Tess basically triples the polys on a object by subdivision of its polys to create a smoother object. Physx allows for particle effects to behave more naturally by being simulated in real time instead of pre computed animations.

 

[Dicehunter]

I seem to remember reading about some modded drivers going around a while ago that allowed you to run an Nvidia card next to your AMD card and enable Physx with smooth performance.

*EDIT* Found the video link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExTG3VPlUAo

Oh and as SkeeterUK stated, Physx and Tesselation are 2 completely different things, One is to do with mainly environment and the other with complex particle effects.

 

[no_1_dave]

tessaltion sort of makes physx a redundant tech. You play a game that has tesslation done correctly it looks a lot better than physx

LMAO